Colloquia+Spring+2014

**Sage 3510** = //**Social Media Applications in Health: Research Opportunities and Challenges **//= = = = = **Ricky Leung** is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy, Management and Behavior at SUNY-Albany’s School of Public Health. His research interests include health management, technological innovation, global health, and transnational studies. In his dissertation, Leung studied nanotechnology development in China, which was funded by a NSF dissertation improvement grant. More recently, he turned attention to health information technology (HIT), including electronic medical and health records, telemedicine, social media and mobile health applications. Leung received his PhD in sociology at University of Wisconsin-Madison. He previously taught at University of Missouri’s School of Medicine, and was a visiting faculty at Brown University.  **abstract:** Social media is now heavily used for various health-related purposes—promoting health awareness, enabling patients to express service concerns, and building support groups and communities—among other things. This presentation will be divided into two parts: First, I will report findings from a research on how hospitals utilized Facebook to increase communication with their stakeholders. While these findings have been published and/or presented elsewhere, they present excellent opportunities for further research. As such, in the second part of the presentation, I will discuss these opportunities in greater detail, and will welcome active interactions from the audience.  **Wednesday, February 12,1:00-2:30** **Sage 3510**
 * Wednesday, March 26, 1-2:30**

=//Science Games: Players, Scientists and Epistemic Games //=

**Casey O'Donnell** is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media at Michigan State University. His research examines the creative collaborative work of videogame design and development. This research examines the cultural and collaborative dynamics that occur in both professional "AAA" organizations and formal and informal "independent" game development communities. His research has spanned game development companies from the United States to India. His first book, //Developer's Dilemma,// will be published by MIT Press in 2014. Casey is an active game developer, releasing "Osy," in 2011, "Against the Gradient," in 2012 and "GLITcH" in 2013. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institute of Health (NIH). O’Donnell received his PhD in from RPI’s STS Department in 2008.

Recently a host of networked digital technologies have been deployed to help biochemists and other scientists decipher long-standing problems in protein structural chemistry and molecular genetics. These technologies bring together important elements from networked computing, information communication technologies, crowdsourcing and video games, leveraging them to create a social web architecture that facilitates participation from novices and experts. Unlike other software tools that help professional scientists carry out their work in protein biochemistry, these tools seek to harness “the knowledge of crowds” by using online collaborative games and puzzles that frame problems in biochemistry. In this talk I will explore the connective tissue between this project and previous projects and gave rise to, "Epistemic Games."
 * abstract **